The X-Axis – 9 October 2011
A new month (and a quiet week for X-books, perhaps because they had the good sense to get most of the line out of the path of Schism #5) means we can get back to the regular format…
Last of the Greats #1 – This is an ongoing series from Joshua Hale Fialkov and Brent Peeples, though the concept doesn’t obviously seem to lend itself to a completely open-ended story. Basically it’s one of those “What if superheroes existed in the real world” set-ups, though it’s a bit more high concept than that.
The Greats are a bunch of Superman-type aliens who showed up twenty years ago and set about making the world a better place, rather in the manner of the Authority. Which is to say, while they probably are on the right side of the argument, they’re also doing it by force in a way that isn’t entirely helpful. So naturally the humans turn on them and wipe them out. Which means that by the time the massive alien invasion shows up, there’s only one of them left, and he’s not all that enthusiastic about leaving the house to help out.
Not that the Last of the Greats seems to make any real pretence of being a superhero; as he explains it, his family came to earth to get humanity ready for something or other (which everyone else takes to be the invasion, but he never actually says so), and he’s rather cynical about the whole enterprise anyway. This would be a perfectly good set-up in its own right, though the ending – which I won’t spoil, since it’s basically what the whole issue is building to – is presumably taking the book somewhere else.
Much of this first issue is taken up with a combination of exposition and set-up for that twist – though the opening two pages also seem to be laying the groundwork for stories further down the line. Personally, I kind of saw the last two pages coming, though the ending as a whole does raise some questions about how much of the preceding exposition is actually true.
More broadly, though, I found the book more interesting in theory than in practice. The opening page is just utterly confusing – there’s no consistent landmarks in the backgrounds of the first three panels, and I honestly don’t know what a 9/11 reference adds beyond misdirection. The humans’ attitude to the Greats doesn’t altogether make sense – why are they so awed by the power of people who are apparently not that hard to kill? It’s also a book which stands or falls depending on how you feel about the title character, since thus far the supporting cast are functional at best. Unfortunately, he’s not really got the charisma to carry a whole series on his shoulders. It’s got its moments, and there are good ideas in here, but the execution doesn’t grab me.
Snarked! #1 – Roger Langridge’s all-ages comedy series based loosely on the Hunting of the Snark. Or rather, on Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poetry generally, since the stars are actually the Walrus and the Carpenter, who come from a different poem altogether. In this version, the Walrus is a conman and the Carpenter is his dimwitted sidekick. Meanwhile, the king has been away for months and is long overdue for his return, so the (very obviously villainous) royal advisors are scheming to take control of the country, as long as they can somehow get rid of Princess Scarlett.
There was a preview issue a few weeks back, but you don’t need to have read it – actually, if anything it begs the question of why some of the characters don’t recognise one another when they’ve already met. Yes, this issue starts with the missing-king story already in progress, but that was case with issue #0 as well.
Roger Langridge has been doing fantastic work for Boom’s all-ages imprint lately – just on a technical level, it’s something of a marvel that he was able to render a recognisable version of the Muppet Show in comics form, complete with inaudible song and dance numbers. Langridge is evidently from the school of thought that believes all-ages stories really should be entertaining for adults too – he can’t seriously be expecting modern kids to get references to Pete and Dud, after all – and this is wonderfully enjoyable work. I suspect it will find a more receptive audience as a collected edition is out, but there’s no denying that this is a great piece of cartooning from someone who really knows how to tell a story and define a character, not to mention writing a decent joke. Genuinely charming stuff.
X-23 #15 – Crikey, Marjorie Liu is really dusting off the backwater villains here. This is part three of “Chaos Theory”, in which X-23 finds herself helping the FF deal with some sort of cosmic weirdness that’s more in their wheelhouse than hers. So last issue brought in the Enigma Force, and this month identifies the villains as the Whirldemons. The Whirldemons are about as obscure as it gets – they appeared in a single storyline in 1981, and haven’t been seen since.
Incidentally, somebody at Marvel has evidently figured out that they’re publishing serials, since footnotes seem to be creeping back into use. Perhaps Axel Alonso has a less hardline stance on them. So this issue dutifully alerts us to the fact that it’s referencing a subplot that hasn’t been mentioned since issue #3. And a good thing too, because frankly, what proportion of the readers would ever make that sort of connection unprompted? Interestingly, there’s some selection going on; this issue also has a recap of the Enigma Force’s origin story, but that doesn’t get a footnote directing us to the relevant issue (Micronauts #35, if you’re wondering). That makes sense; all the relevant information is repeated here, so why bother directing the reader to a thirty-year-old comic that’s out of print anyway?
I digress. There’s certainly some beautiful art in this issue, and I do like the way X-23 retains her disturbingly unflappable air no matter how insane the situation. And in terms of the general shape of the series, it makes sense to bring X-23 back from her world tour and into contact with some more classic superheroes. My problem with this story, I suppose, is that it doesn’t really seem like an X-23 story; it feels like she’s wandered into a different comic where she doesn’t really have a place. Enough of it is done from her perspective to stop her feeling like a redundant guest star in an FF comic, and there’s some hinting that she has a vital role in this story, but three chapters in, I don’t really have a sense of what that role might be. Perhaps it’ll all fit together in the final part.
X-Men #19 – Victor Gischler seems to have no real remit for this series other than to do team-up stories, and admittedly that doesn’t give him a great deal to work with. But “Betrayal in the Bermuda Triangle” seems to have been nothing much more than a homage to Skull the Slayer, a series that ran for eight issues in the mid-1970s. The X-Men and the FF (who really add nothing to this story beyond clutter) team up to answer a rescue message from Lee Forrester and Jim Scully, who have got trapped in the Skull the Slayer world again. The heroes help them fight off an invasion by a bunch of aliens from the original series, and then the two people they were going to rescue… decided to stay after all. Achieved an awful lot there, didn’t we?
Between this and Claws 2, we’ve had two recent stories that seemed to serve no discernible purpose whatsoever, other than to indulge in fond memories of characters of the mid-1970s. Of course, that’s before most of the current readership was born, so it’s ludicrous to expect these stories to succeed on their nostalgia value. There’s no point in dusting off these characters unless you’ve got a story worth telling with them – and while this arc looks suspiciously like a backdoor pilot for a Skull the Slayer revival, it’s really just a generic superhero/fantasy blend. Bizarre misuse of Lee Forrester aside, it’s not outright bad; it’s just very indifferent. Stories like this do not make a good argument for the continued existence of so many X-Men comics.
X-Men: Schism #5 – The final issue, and this is where we get to the eponymous split. With hindsight, the title of this series was perhaps a mistake, since the actual schism is something we’ll be seeing in the fallout issues. What this series contains is the last straw that leads to the split. (And what Prelude to Schism contained… remains a mystery to all.)
As a direction for the X-books, I like the ideological divide here quite a bit. The Utopia set-up has never really clicked, and on any view it makes it harder to tell some types of stories by isolating the characters from the real world. It’s perhaps rather odd that Wolverine alone should be the one to raise the point – to make this work, you really do have to read the series in the light of Jason Aaron’s Wolverine run, and it would have been smart to make that point more explicit in Schism itself – but it’s also quite right that somebody should be questioning Scott’s all-hands-on-deck policy where there are no longer any non-combatants.
The story leaves Aaron and artist Adam Kubert with a tricky balancing act for the final issue. The real climax of this story is Wolverine leaving and a bunch of people going with him. The Sentinel is plainly just a means to that end and a great big metaphor. Aaron lays it on a bit thick by having the Hellfire kids watching and making snide comments about “senseless violence”. But ultimately the fight does work, because you can read it to fit either side’s point of view. For Cyclops, the kids rallied and rose to the occasion, so it was a great heroic stand that proves him right. For Wolverine, the very fact that the battle happened at all only goes to show that they’re getting something wrong – and the victory has to be given a slightly hollow feel to make that work.
Kubert’s work on this issue is great. He’s always a good action artist, and I like the way he’s using slightly wonky panels to give energy and urgency to a basically familiar grid layout. Since I mentioned on the podcast recently that letterbox panels get on my nerves, it’s worth saying that this is an example of them being used well. When they crop up in the fight scene, it’s in a sequence where the panel shape makes sense, and the diagonals keep the tension up. He only goes into regular letterboxes later, when he wants the regularity to re-establish a sense of calm, or when he wants to cut between locations in the epilogue.
Whether we really need Cyclops and Wolverine continuing to fight with one another even when the Sentinel’s on their doorstep… well, that doesn’t really make sense, but I can kind of live with it given superhero comics’ operatic tendencies. I see what Aaron was going for; the story beat is meant to be that they’ve allowed it to become personal, and they’re snapped back into getting their heads together when they see the kids charging in to take over from them. Still, it’s pushing it a bit.
And I’m still not sold on the Hellfire kids. Thematically, I suppose I can see what Aaron’s going for. Wolverine’s objection is to the X-Men putting the kids in the line of fire; the underage supervillains are the dark flipside of that concern. That makes some sense, but the X-Men’s students are proper characters (and drawn a few years older), while the Hellfire brats are such broad caricatures that it’s hard to take them seriously at all. They’re ridiculous, and I’m sure that’s precisely what Jason Aaron likes about them, but it causes problems when they’re being used as something other than comic relief.
The other striking thing about this series is that, while we get a pretty thorough explanation of why Cyclops and Wolverine fall out, we don’t get any explanation of why the other X-Men picked sides. There’s just a bunch of characters, mostly the kids, on Wolverine’s plane without explanation. Presumably all that’s going to be covered in future issues, but it does make the moment of departure feel a little arbitrary here – especially as the kids seemed to be pretty firmly on Scott’s side in the previous issue.
Not a perfect series, then. But for the most part it works. I like the general direction, and I’m glad to see the line moving into a new phase under its new main writers. There’s a lot of promise in this set-up.
Keep in mind that Wolverine still had the detonator that would blow up Utopia. That’s the main reason Cyclops continued the fight, even after the sentinel arrived.
This story was an editorial mandate to get the chess pieces in place for yet another reboot. The actual schism itself was rather hollow.
The way most of the kids are on Logan’s side felt so forced and artificial.
“Well, we showed 95% of the kids want to stay on Utopia, but oh yeah…..Wolverine is opening up a school and schools need students. Drat. Uh, maybe if we have them switch real fast no one will notice! Yeah, that’s the ticket.”
I really don’t get Santo and Anole being on Wolverine’s side when Scott was all about them doing their superhero night patrols in San Francisco.
And the one thing Logan kind of ignores in this whole thing is that the only reason the kids had to fight is because everyone else was gone or incapacitated. It’s not really a normal thing for them to be on the front line, no matter how much Idie talks about being a killer (Aaron really needed to stop laying it on so thick that she’s some Forrest Gump type simpleton who just does what she’s told).
It doesn’t really matter though, in six months there will be a crossover between the two sides, and in a year everyone’s back together. Because that’s just how shallow Marvel are these days.
“The other striking thing about this series is that, while we get a pretty thorough explanation of why Cyclops and Wolverine fall out, we don’t get any explanation of why the other X-Men picked sides. There’s just a bunch of characters, mostly the kids, on Wolverine’s plane without explanation. Presumably all that’s going to be covered in future issues…”
Y’know, this is the exact purpose of the Regenesis one-shot, which just happens to be out in three days. 😛
Schism worked better than expected.
I think that they missed an opportunity to have a look at the wider mutant-human relations. Humans just turned on mutants, and mutants defeated the humans’ anti-mutant weapons. Mutants are probably more feared than ever, but we don’t really touch on that in the final issue of Schism. That might be because it would make Wolverine’s move back to the mansion – the site where so many young x-teens were slaughtered – seem even more crazy.
This has been the first X-series proper I’ve read in aaaaages and was pretty underwhelmed (I get X-Force, which is amazing). I didn’t buy the villains, didn’t buy the disagreement, was probably more interested to see Gambit and Iceman in a comic then anything else.
I really don’t have any interest in either of the two teams, nor whatever direction they’re supposed to take. Wolverine doesn’t want kids to be in battle, but he’s still going to take them to the most recognisable place for mutants, keep all his mutants together and not assume any fights will happen?
I don’t know.
I don’t care. Whatever gets us back to the school set-up. Abandoning it was a mistake.
Now, if they’ll just reverse M-Day…
Right on @Brian
Seems kind of pointless for Logan to be going back to catering for mutant kids when M-Day decimated the majority of them.
I’ve been liking Scott more and more, possibly since they started making him ‘mutant Batman’. Logan just seems to be adopting Prof X’s ‘Lets just all hope for the best and it’ll work out’ ‘mutant dream’.
At least Cyclops is a realist who understands the dire situation the mutant race is in…
I don’t know, I think most real kids would probably agree that they must fight, but given a choice between living on a rock and actually fighting, and living in a mansion and having sleepovers with the Westchester youth, they wouldn’t let their principles slow them down too much.
so, aaron tried his best to make it feel organic and get some real arguments in there, but ultimately, schism just feels like somebody decided that the x-men should split up, and everything else was an afterthought. the new setup has some potential, but the story itself still feels like a stunt to me.
it did leave me wondering whats going to happen to generation hope, though. i assume that idie, laurie, and kenji are going to leave hope, which robs the book of half its cast and its most interesting subplot. im genuinely curious how gillen is going to handle that.
“Seems kind of pointless for Logan to be going back to catering for mutant kids when M-Day decimated the majority of them.”
I could be wrong but I thought it was possible for new mutants to pop up again? Something to do with Hope? I dunno, I don’t read “Generation Hope” (what a stupid name, by the way. Call the book “The Next X-Men.” “Generation Hope” sounds like a daytime tv drama.)
At any rate, even if that’s the case, they still need to reverse M-Day. It’s too limiting. A writer can’t, for example, introduce a completely new mutant character who’s had their mutant powers for several years because it’ll just raise the question of why he/she wasn’t identified post-M-Day.
I definitely enjoyed Schism as a whole (though I too did not like the Hellfire Club Babies. Stupid villains). But in the end, Wolverine’s reasoning just rings so hollow for me as the big X-Men split. It would make sense if it was just Wolverine leaving, but for his concerns to split the entire team just doesn’t work for me. The X-Men have always had teenagers fighting the bad guys, since the very beginning. New Mutants, Generation X, Academy X, Generation Hope…At no point has Utopia ever been about training these teens to be soldiers. Utopia and Cyclops have been training them to be X-Men, just like they’ve been doing with teenagers for 40+ years. Yet all of a sudden Wolverine is against teenage X-Men.
Yet how much you want to be that when Wolverine and the X-Men starts, his x-students are going to fight super-villains and be superheroes. I would love to read a comic that was actually about students being students in a wild and wacky Jean Grey Academy without any superheroics. But you just know there will be attacks on the school and villains and proper comic book stuff. So the kids are going to end up being superheroes anyway.
Also, if Wolverine is running a school now, is he still going to have time to sit around eating and playing poker in New Avengers? Or is he just going to leave Iceman in charge all the time?
I really really liked Schism – and, yeah, Wolverine’s reaction doesn’t seem smart, which I think makes Scott seems like the one that’s on the right.
And I’m okay with it.
Because… looking back, now, on the knowledge that we have of Schism and the recent arcs of Wolverine, I think that Logan’s having what is essentially a mid life crisis. (or any arbitrary-fraction life crisis, since for all intents and puporses he’s immortal).
On his comic, we’ve seen him realizing that that the life he’s lead – essentially, nonstop violence, has resulted only in tragedy for everyone that’s close to him. I could definetely see this as the straw that’s lead to him changing (or trying to change) his way – he realizes that ‘the way of the warrior’ has only brought him suffering, and he sees that what Scott’s been doing lately will only lead to the next generation going through the exact same cycle fo senseless violence that he has live through.
That’s why he’s reinventing himself as a headmaster – he’s trying to rekindle Chavier’s dream, hoping to teach the children that there’s a different way.
And the other characters are following him because, a) he’s the most charismatic X-man still around and, b) he’s saying that there’s an alternative to living their entire life stranded on what essentially a concentration camp floating in the middle of the ocean. The one I can’t quite get is Iceman… I’d think he’d be loyal to Scott.
But, for all of his noble intentions, he clearly has not thought this through: he’s essentially leading a group of young and untrained people back to the place that used to get blown up regularly, and where till quite recently students used to day by the truckload (or, more fittingly, busload). His desire to protect the next generation has lead him to put them in a place where they WILL have to fight as soldiers, unlike he wanted, and some will mostlu like die. Ironically, the children would probably be safer in Utopia.
And that’s why I think Scott’s right: now’s not the time to worry about these kid’s long term future, but to worry that they’ll get to have a future. Extinction awaits mutantkid at every corner, and, as someone who’s had to fight since he was 15, Scott knows that dreams are all fine and dandy, but staying alive is probably better.
I found Schism to be very disappointing. I echo the points made before that Marvel decided 1) the X-Men needed to split and 2) Wolverine had to be one of the leaders, and wrote a story around that mandate, somewhat awkwardly.
The Hellfire kids make no sense. After the first issue or two I thought they would have an angle where the X-Men debated killing them, and that would lead to the schism (pro-killing enemies vs not killing kids) but that never happened. No reason the kids couldn’t be normal adults, and less wacky. Seems almost an idea Aaron came up with elsewhere and wanted to use.
Also, the way the final fight goes really seems to support Cyclops – the kids show up, save the day, and no one dies. After Wolverine was willing to blow up the entire island (and Cyclops!) to kill one Sentinel? Really makes Wolverine look weird for insisting that the kids can’t be kids. (Even weirder is that all the kids end up going with him). And man, did Logan get the short end of the staff, judging from this issue. He gets Iceman, Beast, Kitty and all the kids?
@Henchman4Hire – I see the difference between this and most of the other young mutant teams being that the New Mutants, GenX, and Academy X were never supposed to be trained to be X-Men as a default — it was something they might get an offer for after some arbitrary point when the older team decided they’d graduated. The initial premise was always supposed to be about the new kids learning to control their powers. Now, being outside of that, we knew darn well the kids were going to have whacky adventures where they would be using their powers to escape peril, but the difference was that the senior X-Men were all doing their best to keep the kids out of that sort of thing whenever they could — the New Mutants had to literally sneak out of the school on more than one occasion, Emma Frost kidnapped the GenX crew and hid them away when she thought her past might endanger them, the Academy X kids got sent to a safehouse when the school was attacked, and so on. Trouble was inevitably going to find the kids or the kids were going to go out and get into trouble, but you got the impression that the older X-Men took their responsibility to the youngsters in their care seriously and would keep them safe to the best of their ability.
I haven’t felt that about the current team since way before Divided We Stand, when Emma Frost decided to throw all of the remaining powered students into a cage-match (along with a poorly socialized, emotionally unstable assassin no less) to see which of them were worthy of being trained as X-Men, and none of the other staff called her on it. Then there was the fact that Divided We Stand itself was pretty much Cyclops kicking a bunch of traumatized kids out into the world without any support, the new old New Mutants book opened with Cannonball telling the kids that the photocopy of his dead teammate who had attacked and/or tortured them on multiple occasions had more right to be at the new institute than they did, Cyclops decided that one of the kids losing the ability to breathe air wasn’t worth telling Dr. Nemesis to pull his head out and take a look at the problem, etc.
So I can’t say that Wolverine’s objections come off as false to me, but when taking the arc over in his solo book into account, his motivations do come across as hypocritical and self-serving, because the X-Men have been treating the new kids like crap for a while now and his saying anything at this point just looks like him trying to assuage his own guilt (not to mention this guy is 50/50 for forgetting/dodging responsibility for the kids already in his life as it is).
Last I heard, though, Kitty and Beast were going to be in charge of actually running the school, and that really works for me, given the above, since Kitty was away in a magic bullet during a lot of the nonsense that’s occurred in recent years and Beast told Scott some time ago that he won’t support his new ideology. So, whatever Wolverine’s motivations, I mind him being the one to start the divide far less when the people who are going to be in charge of the day-to-day haven’t been contributing overmuch to the current mess on Utopia.
I agree with many of the above comments about Schism not working. The issues to follow regarding the split might be good, but the build-up itself? Just doesn’t work. If Marvel had been building up to it in the regular titles for months beforehand, or of it wasn’t Wolverine (I still think Storm or Emma would have been better choices, if handled correctly), it could have worked better. But as others said, this feels like it was designed by committee, rather than an organic story. And nothing I’ve seen in Aaron’s Wolverine title helps me connects the dots as to why Wolverine would suddenly act this way.
Wouldn´t it have been much more interesting from a dramatic standpoint if the Schismn thing would be between Scott and Emma? This would play on so many levels, but Scott and Wolverine? Totally artifical conflict with a half-assed motivation.
Wolverine has become a schizophrenic character. He is a loner in his three or four solo-titles, no, he is an Avenger, no, he suddenly leads a school. All in the same month. He has to be a clone or a doombot to fulfill all his obligations. It doesn´t make a lot of sense any longer, which dilutes it further.
I remember a conflict between Emma and Storm in X-treme X-men also called Schism, where Storm left the mansion with a team because she felt it wasn’t being ran properly. This made sense to me, Wolverine really doesn’t. It feels like they just used the poster boy of X-men to launch some new comics. I understand Cyclops involvement but I think they could have chosen a better opposition. Beast would have been my choice.
Speaking of schisms and schizophrenia…
Kitty sided with Logan?
Kitty “Professor Xavier is a jerk!” Pryde who, in her youth, loudly protested Xavier’s attempts to remove her from the X-Men team due to his concern that she was too young to be put in harm’s way?
That Kitty Pryde is now taking the line that the kids really ought to be in school and not out on the front lines?
Okaaaay….
Brian: You have to remember that Kitty was very young when she had that outburst. More than any of the other X-Men, she’s grown into an adult and it makes sense that her perspective has changed, probably substantially, as a result. I can see her looking back and lamenting not having a change at a more normal life.
And I still say Havok would have been the better choice for a split. Bring him back from space, have him react in horror at what Cyclops has built, lead the breakaway faction. Take Wolverine along as his wingman if you want, but using Havok plays into the sibling rivalry thing, and, potentially, let’s Marvel give him a push like they’ve done with other obscure characters recently. Plus, the idea of Wolverine running a school just seems like a really, really bad idea.
Why is Beast joining Wolverine of all people, you’d think he’d just stick with the Avengers for a bit longer? He’s mad at Cylcops for having a team of assassins but he’s perfectly fine with Wolverine for leading a team of assassins?
I hope this gets at least a brief mention in the new X-book, or at the very least, the Beast in the book turns out to be Dark Beast.
The worst thing about the Beast/Scott split is that in Secret Avengers #16 Ellis kind of negated Beast’s entire pity party about why Scott was so wrong to have X-Force be around. It was one of those things where Beast put more people in body bags than X-Force probably did, but he still will probably act like he never left that moral high horse.
AndyD: The problem with a Scott/Emma split is that readers still expect (and some still want) Marvel to split them up anyway, most likely for an eventual return of Jean Grey. And the writers won’t leave the idea alone either. Gillen, for example, is continuing to tease the Emma/Namor pairing that was established by…hrm, was it Fraction?
That would undermine the whole story of an X-Men split,
@Lawrence, @Ken B – I thought the same way, but I was reminded that Beast did NOT actually leave Utopia over X-Force. If you look at the issues of Uncanny leading up to his departure, his main reasons for leaving were (1) Scott left him to be tortured by Osborn as a tactical decision, and (2) his philosophical objections to the Utopia concept itself as a mutant ghetto. Thus siding with Logan and returning to a school in Westchester don’t necessarily conflict with those objections.
Beast did argue with Scott over X-Force prior to that, but his main objection was to the secrecy.
@Brian, I don’t think anyone else answered and I don’t read Generation Hope but as I can understand it they find a new mutant and Hope (and team) rush over so she can ‘power them up/stabilize them’ or whatever her mutant ability is.
@Jack I can’t get Iceman, as in why either side would take him.
Bobby Drake, falls for women he can’t have (Polaris, Annie, Rogue?) Bitches about how nobody is a real X-man except he original 5 (Chuck Austen but still) and only ever evolves his powers when someone forces him to (Loki, Emma multiple teams.)
I have a hard time thinking of a worse x-person to teach mutant kids how to use their powers.
‘Who wants to know how to use their powers? Prof Drake says sit around and wait to be possessed or shattered’
From the wiki:- ‘Iceman is chosen because Wolverine feels has the kind of spirit his the new school needs’
LOLgan
So then who would be the best person to run the school? The Beast?
How is it that I never before noticed that the Beast blew up at Scott over the X-Men having a secret black ops team and then left to join the Avengers secret black ops team?
Lots of people have already covered lots of the reasons Schism didn’t quite work (even if several of its scenes or ideas were decent). But I want to complain for a moment about the Hellfire Kids Club’s master plan.
They wanted to build up anti-mutant tension to sell Sentinels. Fair enough. But the key to the whole thing was “proving” that their Sentinels are the ones everyone needs to buy by … having the X-Men’s ragtag bench warmers tear one apart?
Wouldn’t it have made more sense for the kids to have called their Sentinel off instead of letting the X-Men beat it? Both in story – the kids selling their Sentinels by saying “the only reason the X-Men survived is because we let them!” rather than “sure the X-Men won, but, take our word for it, they were sweating for a bit there” – and in the context of Schism – Wolverine could point out that Scott failed to stop the Sentinel so they need to get the kids out of there and Scott could claim that it just proves that they need to train harder because that Sentinel might not stop next time.
I’m willing to ignore the fact that it was a plot point that the Sentinel had no functional AI or mutant-detection equipment; while I doubt it was intentional, the idea that the kids are actually selling shoddy Sentinels kind of works. But in order to know that the Sentinel “almost took out Utopia” – and the entire plot of Schism (as opposed to the POINT of it, which was the Cyclops/Wolverine fued) was allegedly the kids’ intricate plan to set that up as a selling point – you’d have to have actually seen the battle up close, in which case you’d know that the X-Men didn’t have most of their heavy hitters and didn’t suffer a single casualty, which kind of undermines the kids’ claims.
The whole miniseries was a disaster. Stupid plot, stupid villains, and the entire thing hinges on one character making a decision which comes entirely out of left field and is hopelessly out of character.
It’s clear that this was a case of marketing dictating to editorial. The whole point of the “schism” is to establish Wolverine as leader of the X-Men (I expect the Cyclops/Emma team to either fall apart of be absorbed into Wolverine’s team following some crossover or other down the road). Does this make sense? No, except for selling movies, toys and video games. It’s picking brands and smacking them together.
It’s too bad, because there’s Uncanny X-Force off in the corner there, demonstrating that one can, in fact, do a team book with Wolverine in 2011 and have it be pretty damn enjoyable.
Did anyone else notice the similarities between the Cyclops/Wolverine fight in Schism #5 and the Cyclops/Wolverine fight in Ultimate X-Men. It could because Adam Kubert drew both fights, however I feel like Aaron is channeling Millar.
I agree with wwk5d, Storm or Emma Frost should have been leading the opposition. I understand why Storm was not but in this position. The character has been relegated to sidelines for years, sadly. Wolverine seems to be shoehorned into this position; Wolverine and Storm co-leading the opposition would have been an easier sell for me.
Overall, I think Schism was less of a character story and more plot point to get from A to B. The Generation Hope issues, written by Kieron Gillen, did a much better job of explaining the conflict than Aaron. I hope that Gillen will be able to use the Regenesis one-shot to iron out the rough edges.
I think Marvel’s arranging their dominoes for the return of Jean Grey. They split the X-Men into two factions. The hostility between them will escalate over time until it eventually reaches a boiling point.
Then Jean comes back from the dead and reunites everyone.
… forgot to add that the above is why I think Cyclops and Wolverine were specifically chosen as the faction leaders.
I was just re-reading Wolverine First Class 12 from 2009.
There’s an interesting bit on the last page where Kitty is talking with Xavier and contrasts Wolverine and Cyclops as teachers for kids.
Wolverine treats the X-men as a job that’s part of life; Cyclops as a calling. At this point in time, Kitty thinks it’s better for her as a kid to be taught by someone who treats it as a job, and Xavier seems to agree.
schism just feels like somebody decided that the x-men should split up, and everything else was an afterthought
Well, this is how superhero comics events are written. Civil War came about because Mark Millar likes those stories where heroes fight each other; everything else was added afterwards.
So then who would be the best person to run the school? The Beast?
Xorn!
What?
And isn’t Wolverine naming his school after Jean or something?
Shame 616 Nightcrawler is currently dead, he’d make a great head teacher at Logan’s school.
Good relationship with Logan, his classes were generally the most liked/attended at the Institute and he’s a positive mutant role model for the whole freakish looks/doesn’t let it effect the way he lives his life thing.
“Well, this is how superhero comics events are written. Civil War came about because Mark Millar likes those stories where heroes fight each other; everything else was added afterwards.”
To be fair, I think almost every story in every medium is written in a similar manner. Whether or not the those stories feel organic or not is what makes the difference. I haven’t read schism, but it sounds like it has a whole different set of problems than those that plagued Civil War.
Yes, well when I say “everything else was added afterwards” I’m leaving out logic, common sense and consistent characterisation, which was sort of the point.